Another Day Another Distro – Part 8 – SimplyMEPIS 7.0 Beta 6

This time around I decided to try out another distribution I’d never used before in the shape of MEPIS. I started off with simplyMEPIS 6.5 which seemed a bit dated but luckily it was pointed out to me that 7.0 is due out very soon. I noticed simplyMEPIS 7.0 AntiX had been released recently but it’s a lightweight distribution for older hardware and it’s probably not fair to compare that to the larger distros directly. I might look at lightweight distros in their own right in future. So in the end I decided the best thing to do was check out the latest beta of 7.0 and here’s how I got on:

Installation:I want to say up front that this is obviously a beta version and while it seemed perfectly stable to me, it isn’t considered finished by the developers. I’ll try to take that into account when I look at it but I did run a pre-release version of Ubuntu Gutsy so it’s not a completely unfair comparison.

I inserted the LiveCD and booted the OS without adding the “noapic” option I sometimes need for my motherboard. I always try booting a system without adding this just to see if it works but in most Debian-based distros like Ubuntu it fails. This time though it worked, I saw a warning on the screen but everything booted as normal and I had the desktop up in no time. I stuck to my usual habit of installing the system on my 12gb partition and putting the home folder on a larger partition. The installer was pretty intuitive and seemed to work well but it was a little slow. It took about an hour in the end but I think that was mainly due to the reformatting of my 200gb drive, so it’s understandable. There was a really nice message from Warren the lead developer on the install screen thanking everyone for supporting MEPIS which is nice to see. I know that doesn’t really affect the system in any way but I just wanted to mention it, it’s good to see a developer who’s in touch with the community.

Using The System:First impressions on booting the system suggested that the overall look might be aimed at Mac users. I’m not very familiar with OS X but I have seen the centre dock and colour scheme obviously, this looked a little similar, it may not be deliberate though and it was just my impression. The system comes with a raft of software installed as you would expect. One thing I did find strange was the lack of different workspaces by default. There was no desktop selector, so one of the first things I did was add one to the taskbar and create my usual 4 workspaces. It’s a personal thing I suppose but I like to keep my applications in different workspaces for easy navigation. It only took a minute to add this. I’ve used KDE a lot lately while travelling around different distributions and I have to say the more I use it the more I realise that I’m a Gnome guy at heart. Everyone has different preferences of course but I really do prefer the simplicity and feel of Gnome. I know window managers are interchangeable in all Linux distros and I could have installed Gnome of course but I think most people will stick with the default desktop. So I stuck to KDE.

The screen resolution was set to 1280×1024 and I had to install the binary Nvidia driver to get full 3D support. I did this by using the MEPIS X-Window Assistant, selecting the driver I wanted. This worked well and after an X server reboot the new driver worked but the resolution was still wrong. I tried using the KDE Control Centre to fix it but I didn’t have the option to choose 1440×900 which I needed. My prior Linux knowledge told me that the best way to fix this was to edit the xorg.conf file and add the resolution I wanted there. I did this in the terminal with the Nano editor and again rebooted the X server. This time the screen resolution was set to 1440×1024 which is not what I entered and I was a little puzzled. I opened the display settings dialogue and this time although 1440×1024 was selected there was an option to select 1440×900 which I did, it worked after that but it wasn’t the easiest set up process. There was no 3D desktop installed by default and I had a look at installing Compiz Fusion but trying to do it from a Debian repository as I did on Etch failed. When I ran simplyMEPIS 6.5 it came with Beryl installed and working by default with the binary Nvidia driver, though the resolution problems were still there. As this is a beta I wonder if the finished version of 7.0 will be packaged with Compiz Fusion, it seems possible as 6.5 came with Beryl. Now that Beryl and Compiz have merged again you may find Compiz Fusion is added by the developers. I hope so, I know 3D graphics aren’t everything and there are more important things in a system but it really is the first thing everyone asks me about. If they see a Linux desktop the one thing they want to see is some cool 3D effects to make them drool. It seems to entice people into Linux who may not bother otherwise. I think that has to be good in the long run.

Being based on Debian, MEPIS uses Apt for package management and Synaptic is the default GUI for this as it is on many systems. I found most of the software I needed was already installed, including the latest version of Skype. I did have to install Checkgmail and IcePodder along with a couple of other things but nothing major. I had trouble finding a MEPIS package for Pidgin the instant messaging tool. I don’t think the repositories are quite as deep somehow as the ones you find for Debian and Ubuntu but that’s just my impression. The documentation says you can use Debian and Ubuntu packages if need be but I didn’t have much luck with that, I found a lot of dependency problems during the installs and it created more problems than it solved really. I could of course have installed Pidgin from source I suppose but I decided to move on for now. I found that Flash, Java and all the various Firefox plugins needed were already installed and working, very handy. Multimedia codecs also seemed to be installed as my music played fine in Amarok.

I was able to play Xvid encoded videos straight out of the box. This isn’t an uncommon feature for most distributions these days but it’s still useful.

I found that for some reason my keyboard layout was set to US English instead of UK English and I had to fix that with the Control Centre. This was strange as I distinctly remember selecting UK English in the settings during install, not sure what happened there. Within a pretty short time I was able to get a fully working desktop as I wanted it, my prior Linux and Debian knowledge may have helped a little though.

Conclusions:Overall simplyMEPIS is a good Debian-based KDE distro but it doesn’t really stand out in my opinion. The inclusion of Skype, Flash, multimedia codecs and so on is all very useful but it doesn’t really distinguish it from most other modern Linux distros. I had a look at the forums and found the community to be pretty strong and helpful but not quite as big as those around Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS for example. MEPIS was first released in 2003 with the aim of making an easy to use Debian distribution and it deserves credit for that, it was early to the game but I can’t help thinking Ubuntu has stolen a march on it in recent years.

It’s interesting that simplyMEPIS 6.5 was actually based on Ubuntu and now 7.0 has moved back to Debian as it’s base. I don’t know what the reason for this is but it seems to me the “easy to use Debian” market is pretty well covered right now with Ubuntu and it’s derivatives like Linux Mint, I also think Debian is pretty easy to use in itself these days anyway, maybe that’s just me. It’s true that Ubuntu has the large pockets of Canonical or more accurately South African millionaire Mark Shuttleworth behind it, that’s got to give it an advantage over smaller distros like MEPIS. Warren Woodford and the MEPIS community have put a lot of work into simplyMEPIS and it’s good but to me I just don’t see how it will complete with the likes of Kubuntu. Maybe it’s not trying to compete and one great things about Linux in general is the various flavours on offer, they all make for a richer ecosystem. MEPIS may continue to service it’s community and even grow, I just don’t see it eating into Ubuntu’s user base much. I certainly wish them well and as I said at the start this is only a beta, so maybe there’ll be new features added for release. There isn’t much time though as it’s supposed to be out in the next few weeks. I’ll check out the final release to see if there are any major differences of course but don’t expect to see anything breath taking.

If you want a Debian based distro with a KDE desktop then by all means give simplyMEPIS a try. It’s a competent distribution, not spectacular in my view but you know how the old saying goes “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and there are plenty of people who think MEPIS is beautiful 🙂

EDIT: Following people’s comments it occurred to me that there is something about MEPIS I missed, it’s stability. It is a very stable distro probably more so than Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Apparently the move back to Debian was partly for this reason. So that has to be taken into account, if stability is a key to you then MEPIS is worth a look.CHECK OUT MEPIS HERE

As for a slogan I dunno, like I said nothing really struck me about simpyMEPIS so I’ll just go with this:

“simplyMEPIS: It’s The Distro You’d Shack Up With If Kubuntu Ran Off With Someone Else”

EDIT: Here’s an additional slogan that I thought of with regard to the stability issue.

“simplyMEPIS: It may not be as flashy as some but always reliable and wont run off with the milk man” 🙂

The Werewolf Cometh…I’m moving on to the newly released Fedora 8 codenamed Werewolf next. It’s a distro I’ve used before but not for at least two years, I’ll be interested to see what’s changed in that time. I’ve heard good things so let’s see what it’s really like hey…

Mepis has always provided better hardware support than kubuntu or ubuntu for that matter. It is also faster than Mint 3 or pclinux 2007,ubuntu 7.10,debian etch 4. I’ve also found it more stable, with lower use of system resources. Mepis returned to pure debian base because of more up todate packaging. I found mepis3.3.2 to be better than 6.5 based on ubuntu. I think mepis had fewer bugs before the change to ubuntu base. I for one am glad to see the return to etch . Mepis is the only linux distro I have used that never failed to run on any mechine I’ve tried it on.

I also tried Mepis 7 beta 6, but like all 2.6.22+ distros so far I’ve had problems getting it’s GRUB to work right in my mixed IDE + SATA drives desktop. I also can’t get it to run on the first three GRUB choices and it only runs in VESA… interesting because I had the same problem with Knoppix, PCLOS 0.93, Frugalware, Sidux 2007-1, and others. Ubuntu variants work fine with X.org and so does PCLOS 2007, Sidux 2007-3+, Mandriva, Puppy, and currently using Elive.

I’m a total newbie, but it’s great I can still get plenty of distro’s to work without understanding them…but it means I’ve been using Linux for a year without understanding how they really work.

Mepis have a single problem: have only one developer, Warren Woodford. I suggest you to read his biografy on Wikipedia. He always done high quality software. He release a lot of betas before the final, for his heavy debugged vision, something like Tex at PCLOS. This is the reason his distro is not so eye-candy. He concentrates his attention on the core system. You can improve your appearance after the installation.

And MepisLovers.org is the very useful and friendly community I tried! Ubuntu+Kubuntu don’t help you so quick and so friendly! Try!

I don’t think you enabled all of the repositories. For some reason, several of them come turned off, and it’s a simple enough matter to enable them in Synaptic, but you have to know they’re disabled to begin with.

Also, Kubuntu is buggy as all get out. MEPIS is rock solid. In two weeks, when Kubuntu barely runs, plain-jane MEPIS will be humming right along. Three weeks later, when you’ve come to regret the lack of a root password and a firewall, MEPIS will be happy. Four weeks later, on your second re-install of Kubuntu trying to get it to work consistently, MEPIS will still be running, rock solid.

The reason it switched back to debian as a base was the huge disappointment of using Ubuntu. It lacks backports, not very stable and the hardware support isn’t spectacular either (not talking about out of the box).

I looked at Linux with curiosity as I was not enjoying my Vista experience. I find that the SimplyMepis beta’s Live CDs run on most computers, new ones in the shops or a desktop with a few years use.

Not many of the system I have tried have had fancy video cards, but neither do most brand name computer systems, they still use on-board video graphic.

I started with SimplyMepis 6.5.02 on a recommendation of a friend in May. It was my first Linux install, and the Live CD used my “1680×1050” 21 inch LCD monitor without any changes or modification or typing. MY friend also suggested I try the PCLinuxOS and I had troubles with my computer and being new to Linux I could not fix or adjust the installation so I gave up and tried the other suggestion. I ran the SimplMepis 64-bit version and was delighted everything worked. I was surprised & amazed at the speed of installation, took about 30 minutes for me a new Linux user with a 320gig hard drive.

All the software I needed was in the Kmenu, including an anti-virus software package I have been windowised to run often… I did have to install a $6 e-cycled Gateway SoundBlaster because the 6.5.02 version did not make sound with the on-board sound chip of my computer system. Mepislovers helped me with a missing sound solution almost immediately after asking the question… All the beta versions of the upcoming release 7 have worked well with my computer system, including the on board sound.

I found that the SimplyMepis 64-bit Linux Distro works, its simplicity combined with rock solid performance has made it easy for me & my mouse, going from windows, to Linux an uneventful easy event.

Dan – thanks for reviewing Mepis. Can tell that KDE’s not really your cup of tea, and you’re obviously a Ubuntu man.

Thought I would make a couple of comments – because some parts of the review could be misleading.* Your review compared Mepis to Ubuntu a lot. A bit hard comparing a Gnome distro to a KDE one – a better direct comparison would be to Kubuntu.* Thanks for clarifying the install time (1 hr because of a format on a 200gb drive). As a comparison, I’m beta testing Mepis 7. Last full install was 8 minutes on an 80GB Sata. Had to put it in perspective. * MAC OS Center Dock look-alike? It’s the normal task bar for KDE. You mentioned you’d been testing a lot of kde distros lately …..* Pidgin – yup – not in Etch repos. We do have a properly compiled deb in our forum package sharing section though – so it’s a pretty basic install (with no dependency issues – as they are easy fixed with kpackage). We (the community) provide a lot of precompiled popular packages.* Your slogan at the end (“simplyMEPIS: It’s The Distro You’d Shack Up With If Kubuntu Ran Off With Someone Else”) was the only part of the review that I felt was a low blow. You haven’t reviewed Kubuntu – and by your own admission you’re a Gnome (Ubuntu) man. Would like you to review Kubuntu – then maybe think about that comment. Then I think you’d see just how good Mepis really is.

Don’t get me wrong – I think Ubuntu is an excellent distro, and again thanks for the review. I’d just hate people to read some parts of it, and stop them from at least trying the live-cd. The slogan we like to use is SimplyMepis – it just works.

Thanks for your comments and I have to admit you are right that KDE did put me off a little but I try to always encourage people to test out these things even if don’t particularly like them. It’s a fair point though I take it on board. There is no “one size fits all” in Linux and this is a purely personal account.

For some reason the install of 6.5 was really fast but 7.0 a lot longer, I’m not sure why and maybe it was due to the state of my hard disk after all this installing and formatting lately. To put it in perspective it took me a lot longer to install Etch and this wasn’t at the slower end of the scale on my system it was kind of in the middle. It was just a minor observation since I have reported the install time for other distros I thought people would want to know.

I am an Ubuntu fan I suppose and I’ve used that a lot recently, that’s a fair point but I would choose Debian Etch as my main desktop. I’m a Debian fan more so than an Ubuntu fan. There’s no doubt that the amount of updates and changes constantly being made to Ubuntu make it less stable than a lot of other distros, MEPIS included. I should have referenced the stability of the system and I’ll add that in.

I’m sorry if the slogan bit at the end upset you but I was just trying to think of a funny sign off as it’s something people liked about previous articles. I couldn’t really think of anything for this distro it just didn’t make much of an impression on me. Again it’s personal of course. It was just a flippant comment and hopefully people will take it that way.

You are right in that I have never really used Kubuntu that much and will do a review of it to even things up. I will definitely do that in future. Thanks again for all your comments.

I have to agree that Kubuntu is pure crap! Its like the Kubuntu Devs are completely out of touch with the Ubuntu upstream guys. They are VERY confused about what direction that distro seems to be going towards, or what their goals are. In my book, there really are only three KDE distro’s – Sabayon, PCLos, and Mepis. All other distro’s that sport KDE desktops dont specialize on that WM, they just use it.

Yeah I have to admit as I did before that I haven’t really used Kubuntu often more Ubuntu and it seems the general opinion is that Kubuntu isn’t up to the same standard as Ubuntu, it’s almost an afterthought. That’s the impression I get. I didn’t know that before and I suppose you live and learn.

As people have asked I will look at Kubuntu in it’s own right and see how I think it compares to the other KDE centric distros. I use Gnome more and I seems I need to brush up my KDE knowledge a little 😉

On the whole I think this was a fair review of Mepis beta 6 and would agree with other posters regarding Kubuntu being below-par compared to Mepis.I also think there are 2 other great KDE distros out there that haven’t been mentioned, sidux and kanotix.Maybe you would like to give them a spin too.

Now if you do want to try a lite Mepis, give antiX a try. It will blow your mind. pimp pimp

Thanks for the comments, from what I’ve heard MEPIS is good on lots of different hardware. Unfortunately thats the danger of having one test machine, there’s so much different hardware out there that it’s difficult to give a true indication of how it will work for everyone else. Personal opinions come into play as well of course but I try to be objective.

I will definitely be back to look at MEPIS again, particularly AntiX as a light weight distribution 🙂

Mepis has always been one of the best KDE based distros. I think that it is vastly superior to Kubuntu.

But at the moment I am running PCLOS remaster with the 2.6.23.dev kernel primarily set up for the Gnome desktop but which includes a full KDE desktop. The Live CD (696 MB) when loaded into RAM will install the operating system in 1 minute. If I format my root and home partitions before install (20 Gigs, 124 Gigs) the total install takes 4 minutes on my machine. Then, I have the fastest system I have ever used. Including Puppy.

when is someone going to produce a distro where ALL codecs are installed by default, Shockwave, Adobe, mplayer, vlc, and particularly gstreamer,-/streaming plugins codecs

Why should the potential user be bombarded with all the hype over every flaming distro,..when 98% of them never work fully correct from the moment they are installed. What is the pointof it all??One does not buy a new car to find out the transmission or back axle is missing and you have to build the engine itself

I dont agree with the “richer ecosystem” comment regarding the proliferation of Linux distros. This would only be true if the distros had important differences, but with few exceptions they do not.They differ mainly in name, colour scheme, default desktop (Gnome or KDE), and a different set of bugs. They all do the same things very badly (namely installing applications, using optical drives properly, GUI’s that dont work properly with the root user, crude looking desktop, etc).Now if someone were to release a distro that fixed the real problems, instead of just changing the cosmetics, that would be a real advance.The numerous distros is not an axample of richness, but an example of confusion and the inability of anyone to just get things done right.

In regards to ‘richer ecosystems’ – while it is true that there are some duplicates where the differences are marginal (mandriva/pclos – mepis/mint/ubuntu), there are certainly distros around where there is more than just marginal differences at work.

Elive – the only distro that gives real attention to e17. They produce something very different from everyone else.

Debian – you just have to say there is no other distro around that can match their stability and huge package selection.

Gentoo – compiling everything from source is a radically different way of approaching an OS.

Want full control of your system setup and live on the perpetually bleeding edge? – There’s Archlinux.

Want the control with stability instead? there’s slackware.

Just want to live perpetually on the bleeding edge without doing too much work yourself? – Try Sidux.

Have some old hardware you want to run a newer OS on – try zenwalk, puppy dog or similar fast and lean distros.

This is just a handful of distros that do things in a signficantly different way to each other that cannot be encompassed by the popular and easy to use ‘big distros’ like Ubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSUSE and fedora.

Btw, you choose the resolution you want on the Boot-CD by pressing F3. A rather badly captured shot of this is available here : Mepis Boot CD Guide.

That way Mepis users don’t have to edit their X config files.

Also, on the subject of 3D desktops. Beryl was removed from Mepis 7 because it was being depreciated with the merger back to Compiz and the new Compiz-Fusion.

Compiz-Fusion will not be included on an Official Mepis Linux release at this time because it is simply too large to fit into the budgeted CD space with KDE4.

Placement of Compiz-Fusion into the Mepis Repositories has also been delayed both due to memory leaks from the Nvidia drivers, and only the very recent entry of AMD official support for AIGLX support. Currently Mepis may officially decline to tweak Compiz-Fusion at all and instead let the community handle the packaging and distribution of Compiz-Fusion with the in-progress Community Repository.

Other questions and issues about Mepis 7 might be found in answered in the (Un)Official)Mepis 7 Upgrade FAQ. Unofficial because I wrote it, and but so far neither Warren nor Matt have raised any objectsion.

When you have an older Dell machine with the basic ATI X300 SE graphics card, and you’ve tried and been frustrated by numerous distros, that’s when you appreciate SimplyMepis 6.5. It just works, is fast, and stable. It’s the only distro which can make Beryl work stably and effortlessly with my ATI card. Beryl crashes on Mint 3.0 and PCLOS 2007 (and only worked for those distros in the first place after tweaking xorg.conf). Beryl works SLOOOOWLY with Sabayon 3.4, although it can do see-thru cube faces unlike Mepis. Mepis isn’t the prettiest distro around but I’m happy with it. I just hope the final Debian-based Mepis 7.0 is just as good abt recognizing hardware as ver 6.5, because my Debian Etch install CD couldn’t boot graphically without the noapic and nolapic commands.

SimplyMEPIS simply works, it is stable, and most features are right there from the beginning, ready to go. There are a few advanced features, but they generally are not enabled by default, instead sticking with the tried and true. SimplyMEPIS is simply returning to the most stable, reliable sources it can use to continue to achieve a stable, every day working desktop. For that, I rate SimplyMEPIS number one. For a more current, leading or bleeding edge desktop system, I use sidux as an alternative, but I stick with SimplyMEPIS for every day stability. Even Beta test releases tend to be very stable. The final release won’t come out until all known kinks have been removed, but even in Beta 6 form, this is one solid desktop system and I recommend it.

To the windows user who posted above. Yes there are several distros, and yes there are alot of ‘rebrandings’. That being said, there are many setup problems I’ve encountered with every windows reincarnation, Vista is particularaly awful. Linux offers a wonderful alternative to spending hours removing spyware, spam, viruses, etc.

One more thing, the Linux world is growing. Buisnesses are moving towards it, home users are now adopting it, and Dell is using it.

To the person who made the comment about the E17 distro – do we really need an entire distro just to include a different window manager? Why cant it just be a package for an existing distro? Do we need a Firefox distro, an Opera distro, an OpenOffice distro, a Kaffeine distro? The operating system (Linux) is one thing, and the applications are another. For goodness sake keep them seperate. They should be.

Like many (most?) linux converts, I tried a bunch of distros before settling on Mepis.

The strong plus for me was the hardware recognition. Warren has done a fantastic job here. I’m sure you can find hardware that doesn’t work with Mepis, but for me it was the only KDE-based distro where everything, including sound and video, just worked out of the box. Not that it’s anything special — an old K7 with nForce2 sound and GeForce4 MX video.

The second big plus is the application list. Pretty much all the stuff I want to use is good to go straight away.

I was a little disappointed with the ubuntu-based 6.5, and tried a few others, but none got all my stuff working just right without a lot of unnecessary effort.

The other night, I installed MEPIS 7 Final, and personally, I couldn’t be more pleased. If you’re looking for Linux Nirvana, you don’t need to look any further than MEPIS 7.

Too bad MEPIS doesn’t have the marketing forces behind it that Ubuntu does, because I’ve found MEPIS to be technically superior to Ubuntu. Also, just like others have said on here, I’ve tried Kubuntu, and it sucks, as it feels like little more than a hackjob.

Mepis has always been an extremely conservative distro that was meant to be stable, easy to use, and functional (rather than flashy). Though there are certainly unresolved issues related to hardware support out of the box, it’s comparable to Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS, and as with any distro, can be made to work.

Think of Mepis as a kinder, gentler Debian with a few non-free pieces of software and friendly GUI configuration tools included.

It’s not flashy, but it’s the distro I’d install on my grandfather’s machine.

I have always liked Mepis. Mepis 7.0 is a good distro in many respects. But it is lagging behind the modern linux desktop in respects of its xorg. It is using the old xorg 1.1 which does not support many of the modern laptop graphics cards among others.

Warren has strong reason to stick to the older xorg owing its base to the debian, but many users will suffer from this.